site.btaInterior Minister Mitov: No-confidence Motion Should Be Reasoned, Not Based on Rumours and Slander

"The no-confidence motion should be reasoned, yet what we are given is a hotchpotch, a compilation of rumours, slander, fabrications and denunciations," Interior Minister Daniel Mitov told Parliament during Wednesday’s debate on the fifth no-confidence motion against the government.

Continue the Change - Democratic Bulgaria (CC-DB) and MECh MPs submitted last Friday a motion of no confidence in the Rosen Zhelyazkov Cabinet. The sponsors specified that the motion is over the Cabinet's "failure of internal order and security, justice, and state capture". The motion was debated in Parliament here on Wednesday, after which it will be put to the vote. 

He argued that the Constitution requires the motion to be a substantiated claim supported by facts, evidence and expert analysis. Instead, what had been presented resembled “a Facebook group post filled with troll content rather than a legally sound document – a patchwork of gossip, slander, denunciations, inventions, manipulations, speculations, insinuations, absurd causal links, anonymous sources, and copy-paste from old motives, repackaged as evidence.”

Mitov further questioned why a government only eight months into its mandate should be held accountable for issues from before the beginning of its term.

He stressed that a no-confidence motion is an emergency mechanism, allowing Parliament to terminate the mandate of the executive once it loses the confidence of the MPs. However, when the opposition files such motions without the prospect of securing a majority, or without presenting a clear alternative or governance vision, the instrument comes across as an act of helplessness and a public display of political weakness, Mitov concluded.